Terrorist is a gripping novel by the ever-surprising John Updike, which stands as a brilliant piece of contemporary fiction. It tells the story of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, a young man devoted to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur’an, as taught to him by the imam of his local mosque.

Ahmad, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith is constantly threatened by the materialistic and hedonistic society around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, Northern New Jersey.

Neither Jack Levy, the world-weary guidance counselor at Central High School, nor Joryleen Grant, Ahmad’s mischievously seductive classmate, succeeds in diverting him from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When Ahmad finds employment in a furniture store owned by a recently immigrated Lebanese family, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that reach the Department of Homeland Security.

But to quote the Qur’an: Of those who plot, God is the best.